


A Forbidding Island

by Waxwing



Category: Hellraiser & Related Fandoms, Hellraiser (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-07-22
Packaged: 2018-07-26 01:11:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7554391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waxwing/pseuds/Waxwing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place after the first film and excludes all sequels.<br/>Following the events of the first film, Kirsty doesn't know what to do with all she's learned but still feels that she knows nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Forbidding Island

When Kirsty is honest with herself, which she rarely is, she has to admit that what scares her most is the fact that she's NOT afraid of him...not really. She convinces herself that she is because anyone in their right mind would be and she certainly would like to believe that she's in her right mind despite all she's seen. The many doctors she's seen since the whole ordeal began have done their level best to convince her that she didn't actually see anything, that the Order of the Gash are just a bizzare fantasy that her subconscious mind cooked up to cope with the trauma of what "really happened." From what she's told them, they've decided that what must have "really happened" was that her long lost uncle Frank had at some point gotten in touch with her step mother and together the two of them had plotted to murder Kirsty and her father so that Julia could claim her inheritance. The authorities have found ample evidence that Frank owed money to a lot of less than reputible people and that at some point in the past there had "been something" between him and Julia. It get's a little blurry toward the end (for the cops and the doctors, that is, it's all clear as a bell in Kirstys mind) but they've decided that Frank and Julia must have set off the "explosion" that demolished the house intending for it to kill both Kirsty and her father and fled when they realized Kirsty had survived it. CLEARLY the trauma of the incident must have given poor Kirsty "severe post traumatic stress disorder", which must have led her to develope the "paranoid delusion" that dark supernatural forces had somehow been involved. 

It's all bullshit of course but it's what's gone on all the official records and it's what Kirsty has pretended to believe to avoid spending the rest of her life in an institution. She goes through the motions of helping the police look for Frank and Julia (telling them what little she knows about both of them) knowing that there's no real need to look. Neither of them will be hurting anyone else in THIS world anytime soon. She also goes through the far more arduous task of trying to put her life back together, trying to find her way back to something resembling normalcy despite the fact that she now knows that what she'd thought was normal is and has always been a flimsy illusion. What everyone else percieves as reality is really just a paper thin veniere separating them from the sort of horrors that they should count themselves lucky to never even be able to imagine. 

This is made all the harder by the fact that she still has so much rage inside her but has no idea where to direct it. Of course she still hates Frank but since he's now doomed to spend eternity suffering in ways she could never hope to inflict, that hate will only ever be a pitiful, impotent thing clawing at her insides. She could hate the Cenobites if it weren't for the fact that she can't think of any good reason why she should. At first that seems crazy even to her but the more she goes over it in her mind the less deserving of her rath they seem. Ultimately they'd only hurt Frank, who'd both asked for AND deserved it, and in the end had been more of a solution than a problem. 

Her knee jerk impulse had been to tell the world what she's learned, to warn them of the dangers to which they're all blissfully oblivious but then the part of her that remebers what it's like to be normal tells her how pointless that would be. No amount of evidence (of which she has none) would covince a sane person to believe what she now beleives. She tells herself that she should at least find the puzzle box and...destroy it? No, surely it can't be THAT easy. She remebers what happened the one time she'd tried and that's probablly not even their only door into the human world. Besides...if all they do is hurt people like Frank, do they really NEED to be stopped? She feels that they do but, again, can think of no good reason why. Even if she had a "why" the "how" is even less clear. 

When all is said and done she's left to simply mourn the only man she's ever really trusted, who's gone and left her alone with her shattered life, her fractured sanity and her impotent rage. She supposes she could leave England and go back to America but there's just as little for her there as there is for her here. All that would greet her in America are friends and distant relatives who could not possibly understand the person she's become. Their presence would deprive her of solitude without providing her company. Loneliness begins to eat at her but to her undying shame, it's not memories of her father or her mother or anyone she's ever held dear that come to comfort her. When she does fall into uneasy sleep her dreams are haunted by eyes made of onyx and a voice that rumbles like a distant sea. 

"Oh, we have such sights to show you!" 

Strained with clearly rare emotion, more an earnest promise than a threat. No, in HIM there seemed to be a desire to do more than just inflict punishments. He seemed to want to ...share...to teach, to make some sort of exchange to which he'd been disappointed to find Frank unreceptive. At night, alone in the dark and half way between sleep and lucidity, she sometimes wonders if she might be receptive. After all, isn't a teacher what she needs now? Who better to provide her a map of the strange new world in which she finds herself living than someone so clearly versed in its intricacies as HIM? 

Of course when she revisits these thoughts during her waking hours she tells herself that they're pure madness. If given the chance that THING would kill her or, worse yet, make her wish she were dead. It had looked at her like a specimen to be dissected...or a puzzle to be solved. It was familiar with that strange new world but it was ONLY familiar with that strange new world. Surely any attempts on its part to aid or improve her would be no better than the attempts of an extra terrestrial to give medical aid to an Earthling. It's medicines would poison her and it's tools would over tax her frail, human anatomy. They'd certainly "overtaxed" Frank...but maybe Frank had been beyond hope...or simply unwilling to be healed. 

It's madness, of course, but hasn't sanity failed her? Hasn't everything she's ever trusted to be true been shredded like over cooked meat in the teeth of a greater truth? She feels adrift in an ocean with no familiar shore in sight, having to choose between swimming to a strange, forbidding island that looms on the horizon (where any numbers of dangers could await) or treading water until she exhausts and drowns. The decision is so simple that it can be made on instict, she should swim to the island, whatever resides there is surely better than a watery grave....isn't it? But drowning is at least quick where as the natives of the island would take their time with her. 

She grows so anxious laboring over her decision that it comes as a relief when she realizes that she doesn't actually have a decision to make. There is no "island" because she doesn't even know where the box is. Sure, she's going to be drowning but atleast she doesn't have to worry that her fate may wind up being worse than drowning. In that fatalistic certainty she finds a kind of peace and with that peace comes a return to something almost like normalcy. 

She goes back to her job at the pet store. The modest inheritance her father left her would be more than enough to cover the rent on her one room apartment but she needs something to do with her time. She goes through the motions of daily social interactions and spends her evenings alone. She starts taking pills to sleep (unsure how she feels about the fact that they keep her from dreaming) and off handedly looks into how many it would take to make up a fatal dose. She's not sad or scared or even angry anymore, she's just waiting for her strength to give out and her head to slip below the water. 

There must be more strength left in her limbs than she'd realized because she spends a year mechanically treading water and still does not feel ready to let herself sink. The bottle of pills sits on her bedside table and on a near nightly basis she finds herself holding it and thinking about that fatal dose. More than once she even takes the necessary number of pills out and holds them in her hand but never gets as far as putting them in her mouth. She's not afraid, it just isn't TIME yet. Eventually she begins to miss her dreams (even the company of a remembered monster is preferable to complete isolation) and stops even safe doses of the pills. 

At first her dreams are emotionally draining but in a mundane sort of way. The most commonly recurring one is just the last few times she saw her father playing over and over on a loop, sometimes he has skin, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes the role of her father is played by her uncle Frank but for some reason dream her doesn't notice the troubling change in casting and she awakes feeling irrationally angry and frustrated. Sometimes certain incidences from her childhood concerning Frank replay and she wakes and feels the need to bathe in water so hot that it stings her skin. Sometimes the role of Uncle Frank is played by her father... 

Gradually HE seeps back in. It's strange at first (even more so than anything else involving HIM would be) because he's in her dreams but doesn't take part in them. Usually he'll just be in the room while the scenes play out, standing in a far corner, silently watching. Dream her sees him but makes no acknowledgment of his presence, as though it were perfectly normal for him to be there. Only when she wakes does she feel that her privacy has been violated. 

Her nightly task becomes trying to get her dream self to turn and look directly at him. She finally gets it one night. Dream Kirsty and her father are in a restaurant and her father is telling her for what feels like the hundredth time how concerned he is about Julia and HE is there. She can't see him this time but she can feel his placid, black gaze on the back of her head. It takes all her will power but she begins to slowly turn around in her chair. 

As she turns her head the parts of the restaurant she hadn't been looking at blur and dissolve, because they don't exist in this particular memory, because she HADN'T been looking at them. When she finally sets eyes on HIM, he's not standing in the restaurant. Behind him seems to some amalgamation of her hospital room as she remembers it and the room in which her father died as she remembers it. She can tell that he himself is not just a replaying memory though because he makes eye contact with her and tilts his head inquisitively and she knows she's never seen him do either of those things before. 

She tries to talk to him, later when she wakes she can't remember what she ment to say but it doesn't matter because the words never leave her mouth. Apparently speech requires more strength than her dream self has left because the words stick in her throat and she feels herself start to slip back toward consciousness. Seeing her struggle, a suppressed smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth and she knows that that is also not just a memory. She abruptly comes too in the pitch black of her room, gasping and coughing as though literally choking on her words. She goes to the bathroom and drinks cold water from her cupped hands before splashing some on her face. 

Deciding there's no point in trying to sleep anymore, she disrobes (somewhat reluctantly because she still doesn't feel as though she's alone) and steps into the shower. As she dresses, uneasiness begins to creep into her mind but not for any of the obvious reasons.What's got her on edge is the fact that she knows she should be afraid but she isn't...atleast not of him. What she's afraid of is the dark, secret part of herself that she's spent her whole life refusing to acknowledge because that part of her is....relieved to see him, even....flattered by his continued attentions. She tells herself how wrong it is to feel that way but that does nothing to diminish the sense of anticipation that follows her through the day.


End file.
